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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
Oklo completes end-to-end demonstration of advanced fuel recycling
Oklo Inc. has announced that it has completed the first end-to-end demonstration of its advanced fuel recycling process as part of an ongoing $5 million project in collaboration with Argonne and Idaho National Laboratories. Oklo’s goal: scaling up its fuel recycling capabilities to deploy a commercial-scale recycling facility that would increase advanced reactor fuel supplies and enhance fuel cost effectiveness for its planned sodium fast reactors.
Risto Harjula, Jukka Lehto, Esko H. Tusa, Asko Paavola
Nuclear Technology | Volume 107 | Number 3 | September 1994 | Pages 272-278
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT94-A35007
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An industrial scale process utilizing hexacyanoferrate-based ion exchangers was developed for the selective separation of radioactive cesium from nuclear waste solutions. This process was put into operation at the Loviisa Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) (pressurized water reactor, VVER-440), Finland, at the end of 1991, and it has shown superiority to any other cesium separation method used at present at nuclear plants. This paper summarizes the work that was carried out in the development of this process. In the first phase of the work, the performance of several cesium-specific precipitants and ion exchangers (eg., zeolites and hexacyanoferrates) was tested by laboratory experiments. Based on these initial tests, two precipitants, sodium hexanitrocobaltate and tungstophosphoric acid, and two hexacyanoferrate exchangers were chosen for pilotscale experiments. These experiments showed that the hexacyanoferrate ion exchangers were the most efficient materials for the removal of 137Cs and 134Cs and were suitable for large-scale column operation. With hexacyanoferrates, decontamination factors (DFs) of several thousands and volume reduction factors (VRFs) in the range of 2000 to 10000, were obtained for 137Cs and 134Cs. By using the cesium-specific precipitants, DFs and VRFs on the order of 100 were feasible in the Loviisa concentrates. After the pilot experiments, an exchanger based on hexacyanoferrate was chosen to be used in the full-scale cesium-separation plant constructed at the Loviisa NPP.